Hey, they did it when the switched from laserdiscs to DVDs, right?aox wrote:no it isn't.perkizitore wrote: It's idiotic thinking Criterion will inevitably upgrade all their catalog.
Personally, BD is good enough for me. No doubt 2K and/or 4K technology will eventually become a mass produced reality but a high quality 1080p BD is close enough to the level of information of a 35mm print (I believe its around 70-80% depending on production and film stock choices and some sites and sources will roughly convert 35mm to a line rating that I'm too lazy to look up).swo17 wrote:Ooookaaaay...but by the time Criterion finally gets around to releasing, say, Human Condition on Blu-ray in 20 years, won't you have already proclaimed your undying zealous allegiance to whatever might be the prevailing format of the time, at which point Blu will have taken DVD's place as the "inferior," undesirable format?aox wrote:So we agree! Perkizitore's statement was erroneous. Thank you for doing the math.
rights issues aside.Matt wrote:Hey, they did it when the switched from laserdiscs to DVDs, right?aox wrote:no it isn't.perkizitore wrote:It's idiotic thinking Criterion will inevitably upgrade all their catalog.
I'm likely in the minority but if I had to pick one B&W Criterion release that I would love to get the Blu treatment I would pick Sword of Doom.Michael Kerpan wrote:Neither film has first-rate elements, even by the relatively low standards that applies to the surviving Ozu films. And (so far as I know) Shochiku hasn't even hinted at doing Japanese Blu-Ray releases of Ozu yet.aox wrote:What do people think will be the first Ozu to go Blu for Criterion? Is Tokyo Story too obvious? I am kind of hoping for An Autumn Afternoon.
I wouldn't hold my breath for Ozu BRDs.
Hey, we've got a good argument going here. Let's not turn this into yet another random speculation thread.Blood Pie wrote:I'm likely in the minority but if I had to pick one B&W Criterion release that I would love to get the Blu treatment I would pick Sword of Doom.
Sorry about that. That's actually my fault. I was trying to lighten up the thread with the Ozu speculation. Everyone likes Ozu speculation.Matt wrote:Hey, we've got a good argument going here. Let's not turn this into yet another random speculation thread.Blood Pie wrote:I'm likely in the minority but if I had to pick one B&W Criterion release that I would love to get the Blu treatment I would pick Sword of Doom.
You had me at hello.Matt wrote:Hey, we've got a good argument going here. Let's not turn this into yet another random speculation thread.Blood Pie wrote:I'm likely in the minority but if I had to pick one B&W Criterion release that I would love to get the Blu treatment I would pick Sword of Doom.
oh please let this happen...Cinephrenic wrote:Next Blu classics...
The Red Shoes
Jules and Jim
The Rules of the Game
L'avventura
Seven Samurai
M
Pickpocket
Breathless
Amarcord
Army of Shadows
But doesn't this make this entire argument way too abstract? Rights issues are never going to go away, and such concerns (along with your basic commercial realities) are exactly the sort of things that can make the current DVD release of a given title the best you're ever going to see. We've already seen any number of DVDs of important films disappear off the face of the earth, with no upgrade or reissue on the horizon - why should BluRay be some kind of archivist's panacea?aox wrote:rights issues aside.Matt wrote:Hey, they did it when the switched from laserdiscs to DVDs, right?aox wrote:no it isn't.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but Blu-ray has 1080 horizontal lines of resolution. 35mm film can be reasonably replicated at around 4K resolution. That's four times more lines of resolution. When you square that, it puts a 4K scan as having about 14 times more information than Blu-ray. Or in other words, a Blu-ray frame retains only like 7% of the info from a 35 mm frame. Granted, that's a huge improvement over the roughly 1% of DVD, but it still leaves plenty of room for improvement. And that's precisely the kind of improvement you're going to be wanting in 20 years when everyone who's anyone has 300" Ultra-HD flat panels in their living rooms.Blood Pie wrote:No doubt 2K and/or 4K technology will eventually become a mass produced reality but a high quality 1080p BD is close enough to the level of information of a 35mm print (I believe its around 70-80% depending on production and film stock choices and some sites and sources will roughly convert 35mm to a line rating that I'm too lazy to look up).
That's the same excuse people use for voting one of the two major political countries in every western democracy. You don't know if something works until you see the result, but negativity doesn't lead anywhere. If people weren't buying everything from Amazon, they would have saved money and take prices down in general. But, some people can never be happy whatever the price they pay if their DVDs become 'obsolete'. So, bitching still takes place each time a sales takes place. :-kJun-Dai wrote:Good point. I guess that while I don't deny that one votes with one's dollars, but I do think that voting with one's dollars is very rarely worth even thinking about, unless it's part of a recognized and organized boycott. Voting with one's dollars as a personal decision is about as effectiveMichael Kerpan wrote:One votes with one's dollars on a constant basis -- whether one "wants to" or not.
How are the Haydn performances? ;~} (I still rely on my old Dorati LPs).
But you are assuming that we are saying the format is more important than the film which it never is. Speaking for myself I just don't feel the need to spend money on permanently owning something that MIGHT get released as a blu down the line. If it never gets released and I want it that bad I'll buy it on DVD. But for me Criterion releases are nice little slices of film history preservation and if I'm going to own any of them I want them on Blu.zedz wrote:But doesn't this make this entire argument way too abstract? Rights issues are never going to go away, and such concerns (along with your basic commercial realities) are exactly the sort of things that can make the current DVD release of a given title the best you're ever going to see. We've already seen any number of DVDs of important films disappear off the face of the earth, with no upgrade or reissue on the horizon - why should BluRay be some kind of archivist's panacea?aox wrote:rights issues aside.Matt wrote:Hey, they did it when the switched from laserdiscs to DVDs, right?
Criterion's rights to something like The Human Condition are likely to expire long before there's enough potential demand to justify a Blu upgrade, and a project on that scale is unlikely to attract many other companies (particularly if the materials, as they stand, aren't yet up to a BD release). Another possible scenario is that Criterion do retain the rights to the films and have the capability to produce a Blu version, but that the commercial performance of the initial release was so mediocre that such a release is not economically justifiable.
From my perspective, the percentage of films that I'm really interested in that are also likely BluRay releases in the next five to ten years (even generously allowing for a mighty expansion of capacity from Criterion and MoC) is so small that a Stalinist hard line like aox's seems incredibly self-defeating - as is being content to limit your viewing choices to discs that can be rented in your own region. A lot of the most exciting releases around the world nowadays are marginal films, from marginal companies, transfered from marginal elements - things nobody's going to touch with an HD bargepole in my lifetime. But who cares? I can see them right now, and for me the film's much more important than the format.
Well, I could be wrong, but 35mm was roughly converted as few hundred lines more than 1080p according to most of the info I could find which was minimal.swo17 wrote:Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but Blu-ray has 1080 horizontal lines of resolution. 35mm film can be reasonably replicated at around 4K resolution. That's four times more lines of resolution. When you square that, it puts a 4K scan as having about 14 times more information than Blu-ray. Or in other words, a Blu-ray frame retains only like 7% of the info from a 35 mm frame. Granted, that's a huge improvement over the roughly 1% of DVD, but it still leaves plenty of room for improvement. And that's precisely the kind of improvement you're going to be wanting in 20 years when everyone who's anyone has 300" Ultra-HD flat panels in their living rooms.Blood Pie wrote:No doubt 2K and/or 4K technology will eventually become a mass produced reality but a high quality 1080p BD is close enough to the level of information of a 35mm print (I believe its around 70-80% depending on production and film stock choices and some sites and sources will roughly convert 35mm to a line rating that I'm too lazy to look up).
Very valid point, i don't live in the US, so i have to buy the Criterion BDs. The most important thing it's not the format, it's the transfer quality. Sometimes even this cannot be helped when the interest is small and the print in bad shape. Many discs have such inferior presentation, that you would hardly notice any difference if you download them.zedz wrote:But doesn't this make this entire argument way too abstract? Rights issues are never going to go away, and such concerns (along with your basic commercial realities) are exactly the sort of things that can make the current DVD release of a given title the best you're ever going to see. We've already seen any number of DVDs of important films disappear off the face of the earth, with no upgrade or reissue on the horizon - why should BluRay be some kind of archivist's panacea?aox wrote:rights issues aside.Matt wrote:Hey, they did it when the switched from laserdiscs to DVDs, right?
Criterion's rights to something like The Human Condition are likely to expire long before there's enough potential demand to justify a Blu upgrade, and a project on that scale is unlikely to attract many other companies (particularly if the materials, as they stand, aren't yet up to a BD release). Another possible scenario is that Criterion do retain the rights to the films and have the capability to produce a Blu version, but that the commercial performance of the initial release was so mediocre that such a release is not economically justifiable.
From my perspective, the percentage of films that I'm really interested in that are also likely BluRay releases in the next five to ten years (even generously allowing for a mighty expansion of capacity from Criterion and MoC) is so small that a Stalinist hard line like aox's seems incredibly self-defeating - as is being content to limit your viewing choices to discs that can be rented in your own region. A lot of the most exciting releases around the world nowadays are marginal films, from marginal companies, transfered from marginal elements - things nobody's going to touch with an HD bargepole in my lifetime. But who cares? I can see them right now, and for me the film's much more important than the format.
I do secretly wish that every title (that I'm interested in) would be put out on Blu, just as I also secretly wish that every year, Criterion would ask me which 50 movies I would like for them to put out. But I also recognize that they are running a business, and when something like the War Trilogy doesn't qualify for Blu, I can fully understand their motivation for making this decision, and realize that it does not necessarily correspond to their estimation of the films' worth per se.Blood Pie wrote:And it is odd that a site based around a company who puts so much time and care into how they PRESENT the films seems so ok with DVDs instead of pushing for BD treatment on all new titles.
I don't believe in region coding and I think region free Blu Rays should spread throughout the world, so I would say I am more of a Trotskyist.zedz wrote: that a Stalinist hard line like aox's seems incredibly self-defeating
If that was released 2 years later it would be Blu-Ray only. When a lower quality DVD exists (Dinner with Andre, Z) they know people will buy it anyway. If a film is not in circulation or their schedule permits it they release the title in both formats. But, probably until 2011-2012 they will only be upgrading their extremely popular titles (Kurosawa, Fellini, Bergman etc.)swo17 wrote:I do secretly wish that every title (that I'm interested in) would be put out on Blu, just as I also secretly wish that every year, Criterion would ask me which 50 movies I would like for them to put out. But I also recognize that they are running a business, and when something like the War Trilogy doesn't qualify for Blu, I can fully understand their motivation for making this decision, and realize that it does not necessarily correspond to their estimation of the films' worth per se.Blood Pie wrote:And it is odd that a site based around a company who puts so much time and care into how they PRESENT the films seems so ok with DVDs instead of pushing for BD treatment on all new titles.
Nicely put!aox wrote:I don't believe in region coding and I think region free Blu Rays should spread throughout the world, so I would say I am more of a Trotskyist.
And it's for this reason that I'm surprised to find myself on aox's side of the argument, entirely by default. I think the only home video release of any kind I've bought this year is Chungking Express on Blu-ray. There were many other releases I wanted very badly on both DVD and BD, but this one just happened to come out during a brief window of time in which I had a tiny bit of extra money to spend. I simply haven't been able to afford such luxuries the rest of the year -- even the cash I got for my birthday was spent on food. And if I can buy anything else, it will probably be Last Year at Marienbad.Michael Kerpan wrote:One votes with one's dollars on a constant basis -- whether one "wants to" or not.
Well, no, actually. I'm quite content to wait another 12 years to see these, or 20, or 30.zedz wrote:How about Hou Hsiao-Hsien? Are you going to entirely avoid his pre-2000 films, one of the most important bodies of work in modern cinema, simply because they've never been released in decent transfers? So far we've been waiting about twelve years since the first mediocre releases, we've got all the way through the supposed 'DVD boom', and none of these films have got first-rate releases. I guess it's time to call it quits and resign yourself to the substandard discs. It's better than not seeing the films at all, right?
You're both wrong. For starters, 1080p is, as you say, horizontal lines of resolution, but 4K is not. 4K is horizontal pixels (vertical lines) of resolution. So 1080p (1920x1080, or 2.1MP) is pretty close to 2K (2048x1152, depending on whose 2K you're using. 2.35MP), which is quite a bit less than 4K, but not 14x. 4K is typically something like 4096x2048 (2:1) or 4096x2304 (Redcode RAW), which puts it in the ballpark of 8-9.5 MP. Roughly 4x 1080p, which is roughly 4x 480p (though it gets more complex with anamorphic DVDs).Blood Pie wrote:Well, I could be wrong, but 35mm was roughly converted as few hundred lines more than 1080p according to most of the info I could find which was minimal.swo17 wrote:Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but Blu-ray has 1080 horizontal lines of resolution. 35mm film can be reasonably replicated at around 4K resolution. That's four times more lines of resolution. When you square that, it puts a 4K scan as having about 14 times more information than Blu-ray. Or in other words, a Blu-ray frame retains only like 7% of the info from a 35 mm frame. Granted, that's a huge improvement over the roughly 1% of DVD, but it still leaves plenty of room for improvement. And that's precisely the kind of improvement you're going to be wanting in 20 years when everyone who's anyone has 300" Ultra-HD flat panels in their living rooms.Blood Pie wrote:No doubt 2K and/or 4K technology will eventually become a mass produced reality but a high quality 1080p BD is close enough to the level of information of a 35mm print (I believe its around 70-80% depending on production and film stock choices and some sites and sources will roughly convert 35mm to a line rating that I'm too lazy to look up).
I'll look for the information nd post it when I find it.
But thats my point. 1080p may not be perfect or as insane as using a red camera with a 35mm lens but it stacks up quite well against 2k as they are pretty close.Jun-Dai wrote:You're both wrong. For starters, 1080p is, as you say, horizontal lines of resolution, but 4K is not. 4K is horizontal pixels (vertical lines) of resolution. So 1080p (1920x1080, or 2.1MP) is pretty close to 2K (2048x1152, depending on whose 2K you're using. 2.35MP), which is quite a bit less than 4K, but not 14x. 4K is typically something like 4096x2048 (2:1) or 4096x2304 (Redcode RAW), which puts it in the ballpark of 8-9.5 MP. Roughly 4x 1080p, which is roughly 4x 480p (though it gets more complex with anamorphic DVDs).Blood Pie wrote:Well, I could be wrong, but 35mm was roughly converted as few hundred lines more than 1080p according to most of the info I could find which was minimal.swo17 wrote: Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but Blu-ray has 1080 horizontal lines of resolution. 35mm film can be reasonably replicated at around 4K resolution. That's four times more lines of resolution. When you square that, it puts a 4K scan as having about 14 times more information than Blu-ray. Or in other words, a Blu-ray frame retains only like 7% of the info from a 35 mm frame. Granted, that's a huge improvement over the roughly 1% of DVD, but it still leaves plenty of room for improvement. And that's precisely the kind of improvement you're going to be wanting in 20 years when everyone who's anyone has 300" Ultra-HD flat panels in their living rooms.
I'll look for the information nd post it when I find it.
That said, 2K is what almost all movie theaters project when they are projecting digitally. 4K projectors are still pretty uncommon (I don't know of any in NY theaters). Up until a few years ago, most digital film restorations were being at 2K (I think Alien was 2K), and the results in the theater were good enough for most people (not so great if you sat in the front row).
That said, film's detail doesn't resolve as pixels, so it's sort of a sliding scale. If you take a 2K image and put it on film, film can mostly handle the level of detail present. If you take a 4K image and put it on film, you're going to start to lose a lot of the detail in the video, even if it captures more detail than the 2K image. If you move to 6K, you'll still gain detail on the film stock, but it won't be nearly as dramatic a difference as going from 4K video to 6K video.
There's a link around somewhere to a 6K still from the 6K restoration of Yojimbo. Looking at that you can see that there's a ton of detail that would get lost in a 1080p, 2K, or 3K transfer. Whether that detail is important is another question.
Personally, I would prefer a format that not only renders the fact of grain (as DVD can do with a grain film), but renders the texture of the grain as well. 1080p isn't really enough for that.
If I recall correctly, standard 35mm film stock is about half as much film area (a little less for 1.85 films, a little more for Super 35) as still 35mm photography. What that means is that you can look for comparisons between digital and analog still photography, and expect that most motion picture film stock will register detail at about half the digital-resolution-equivalent as an equivalent still photography film stock. VistaVision (In the Realm of the Senses) and 65mm (The Leopard) are, I believe, comparable to 35mm still photography (65mm is a little bit bigger).
The "resolving power" of film stocks vary greatly depending on the ISO, the contrast of the image, B&W vs color, and the stock itself. It's really just a measurement of the point at which lines become indistinct when you have so many in relation to the area physically taken up on the film. This isn't exactly comparable to digital, where a line is a line. But I believe a good resolving power is ~120 lines/mm whereas a very poor resolving power is more like ~33 lines/mm. Keep in mind that a "line" here is really a line pair. If we pretend that it's an apples-to-apples comparison (it's not), that would translate to 5300x3840 (>5K) versus 1452x1056 (closer to BD than DVD) for an anamorphic or academy film.
Precisely! Thats why I was questioning the notion that only buying BDs or only DVDs or a little of both really meant anything one way or the other.Jun-Dai wrote:Right, speaking of voting with one's dollars, assuming you have a limited money supply for these purposes, it's a little ambiguous to me which would encourage Criterion to release a Blu-ray of film X more:
* Buying film X on DVD (indicates support for the film)
* Buying film Y on Blu-ray (indicates support for the format)